For those of you who aren experienced modders, much of which follows is just preaching to the choir. But for those of you new to modding, you may find this useful..
As some of you know, FE development was led by modders. Derek Paxton and Jon Shafer are best known for their Civ 4 mods (Fall From Heaven in Derek's case). As for myself, I got my modding start with Civ 1, MOM, Total Annihilation, and so on. My love of Civilization 1 ultimately led to writing Galactic Civilizations.
And this brings me to the frustrating part of modding: the limited lifespan of the mod. I eventually got to know Total Annihilation so well that had they made a Total Annihilation 2 with a derivative of their original engine I'd been already set up to do crazy cool stuff. But that didn't happen (and don't talk to me about TA:K).
So our approach has been to approach Elemental from the perspective of it being a platform that mods can be built with for years to come. Many of the mods that worked with War of Magic work, with slight changes, with FE. That's because WOM and FE are built on the same platform which we call Kumquat.
Kumquat is a relatively new engine and we have land-based strategy games scheduled to use it and upgraded versions of it for the next several years -- and not just Elemental universe games. So the skills and understandings of what you get from modding FE will lend itself to more modding.
We also plan to support both Nexus Mods and the Steam workshop as we go forward in ways that make what we have today seem very primitive.
The point being, the age old issues of short-lifespan mods is something we are hoping Kumquat addresses. We looked at Kumquat as a platform that modders can use to create increasingly ambitious mods. I can't promise source code or scripting support yet. Resources are tight, but we will be supporting this underlying platform and the expansion of its capabilities until *at least* 2017.
If you played WOM in 2010, consider what FE is like in 2012. Now, consider what Kumquat will be like in 2014.
Traditionally modders made their own way, wrote their own docs, discovered things our selves and shared those discoveries on the forums. Frogboy is from the generation of modders that worked that way. From a period in time when editors where rare or restricted to basic map editors. Modding was frowned up on and modders battled hard for acceptance.
Devs that wanted their games to be modded left the files editable directly or indirectly. Those that didnt left us having to hack the files to get access to them and edit them. Staying clear of the exe with the DRM was and still is requirement if you want to mod a game.
What todays generation of modders are asking for is fully functional middleware to be thrown in with the game and fully documented. Attractive though that is, it is never going to happen. You have to pay £100s if not £1000s for that, so your not going to get it for free just because you paid £25 for a game.
What happens from here on in is down to us modders, we make our own future. Stardock has given us a good start, but they have games to make and if we are honest, would not we prefer them to focus on that ?
Long story short, we will figure it out our selves, that is where the fun in modding starts. All we have to do is keep posting what we figure out as Heavenfall has been doing. In the end we will master it and have the docs we need.
I completely disagree. Every dev journal that mentions modding talks about how mod-ible this game was going to be, and that they were developing and targeting modders to be able to easily mod the game. It's not as if they merely said it was mod friendly, they pushed it at us. When asked about a certain feature, one of the answers is that it was mod-ible. That the future mods were going to make this game truly epic. Mod this, mod that. So the understanding from a lot of people was that it would be made more easier and more accessible than other games. There are plenty of games with modding editors distributed with their games.
If a game studio is going to brag about how easily it is to mod their game, how easily it is to add new items, encourage the players to create new items, then they should also provide a bit more information. I applaud the fact that some people have been able to create some truly great mods, but there are so many ideas out there from people like me who do not have the time nor inclination, nor the history of being a modder that it isn't productive for them.
I agree with Heavenfall, despite all the talk about supporting modding, I see very little evidence of it actually happening. Has there ever been a dev comment in a modder's request thread, either for WoM or FE? Never mind having one of those requests fulfilled.
Maybe they'll get to it after the first expansion (is that really being released in January? Seems awfully fast, 3 months after FE's release), but I'll believe it when I see it..
The discovering/learning process when approaching the modding is "fine". While a document with instructions would be helpful, it's not required.
It goes just as well for editors- quest editors and race editors, which we got, can be done in xml as well, just not as easily.
The problem starts when a modder has a unique idea, and his only way to get it to work is hack the game to change it. If this happens once or twice, it's "fine". But when every modder in the community gets into stone walls that he can't by-pass, it's a problem, especially when we are talking about a game that ship's itself as mod-friendly.
Just a couple of examples for basic things that you'd expect the player to do- pulling data such as "how much gold do I have", or doing something different than FE did, such as enchantments not limited by essence.
The original idea (in WoM) was to allow python scripting side by side, so a modder that couldn't get what he wanted with xml, could go write a few lines in python, and "fix" his idea into the game. Unfortunately, FE (not sure if WoM did) does not support scripting at this time.
I will wait to see what happens after the expansion. The official position and comments by the devs have promised stuff and then not delivered. That is true. But they had some pretty good reasons for not delivering for WoM. No money. Then FE came out and we got stickies as "mod support" or perhaps they count the thread detailing the modding tools too. I think for me, I have been using all that stuff since WoM, so it's not new or support. Really, there are only a handful and serious modders and we have all been expecting them to deliver on some promises for a long time. Perhaps the problem is that the devs see the scope of modding to just be adding content in simple forms. I would be fine with that if the game was perfect and didn't need to be heavily redesigned to appeal to me. But it does. There are things the game still needs that the devs don't care to add. I am happy to add them myself, but we are extremely limited in our ability to do it due to the scope of modding the devs have planned for. It's a problematic situation.
I still have to believe that the official position in the OP is their overall intention and that the lack of follow through is due to budget constraints. If that is so, after the expansion they have one last opportunity to invest in modding for the game as much as they have claimed to want to. Selling a more moddable FE is going to be more profitable than selling two Kumquat games with the current modding scope. That seems pretty obvious to me.
Like the handling of shards being hard-coded. It makes any major overhauls to the magic system impossible.
I think we should recognize the efforts made. They have done these things that were specifically aimed at modding with no impact on the main game:
- Added a no-object-spawn switch to player-made maps (used extensively by cephalo for Elementerra2)
- Changed the place where we put our mods, originally placed in /mods/ in the installation directory they got their own folder in the "my documents" folder
- Added Wincustomize FE site
- Released the Sovereign Modding Pack
If there's something more I can't bring it to mind. Everything else, as far as I can tell, was just making sure /mods/ could accept new content made by players.
My problem with Elemental modding has always been, and will forever be... the AI. Until we can affect the AI, we just can't make any big changes to the game. Adding something new just means watching the AI not know how to use it, so you'll always be playing against the base AI/game. Since it's a singleplayer game... you can only add stuff that you'll use, you can't add things that you want used against you. So adding something cool is basically just cheating in a creative way.
I am pretty sure the IsWorthy calcs are working now. The last two updates had changes in the changelog for those tags. And with AI priority, we can mod much of the AI. We can even create strategies for specific kinds of factions. I don't recall any game that has done more than this.
the one annoyance i have is my own fault. I remember back when modding was hard and modding meant having 2-3 installs of your game on HD with different shortcuts to each one - recently, modding in most games became streamlined - just push a button and *POOF* mod is installed.
FE takes us back to the days before one-click systems and i am having a hard time figuring out the whole thing. I look at the mod folder in /mygames and i am just lost - i wouldn't even know where/how to install a mod.
It has made me appreciate Civ 5 with a whole new light because i never realized how complex some of it can be. Hopefully, FE can become more "mod install friendly" but for now i have some learning to do.
Well said.
Sincerely~ Kongdej
I am making a series of tutorials to show people how to make the game awesome (install and make mods).
that is why i have not been complaining about things - because i know that solutions are underway.
Once i have a better idea of what to do and how to do it, i hope to make good contributions like you have.
What I want to mod isn't that ambitious but simply can't be done now, so I'll wait. But I'd like to at least see some indication from Brad and Derek that they're planning to do more than talk the talk, and actually walk the walk.
Maybe if they wanted to show their commitment by addressing a mod bug or two or perhaps answering some requests in the requests thread?
I would actually like to see some sort of statement concerning this, besides the same old same old empty promises.
To be just completly honest the most painful thing right now is having to CONSTANTLY reload the client anytime you save an asset in order to see that asset. They desperatly need to have some way to reload assets that are created by the tools, or manually modded outside the tools, without exiting and restarting the client. It is a massive time sink. From a versioning standpoint its really crazy. Also I think this is what causes all the start position and other tile modifiers to stop working after the first save in cartographer. This is a huge problem.
On top of that possibly just a way to start the tools without starting the client.
As someone who has used tools for modding it is getting pretty untolerable for me and I can just imagine someone who just wants to create an object going into those tools hitting save and not seeing their creation, then restarting once they figure it out and making a change and saving then restarting .. ad nauseum there going to give up pretty quick.
In light of a problem like this we really need to differentiate between asking for features and asking for something to not cause us all to throw away an extra 30 minutes per hour of actual modding just from fighting the lack of refresh/reload of assets thats standard functionality in almost any app.
I really have to agree with Jam3, after creating a creative work-around, or attempting to, having to load the game anew to test it every time coupled with the other problems mentioned can make modding a big headache, which is not very user friendly.
The fact that it can be modded without third party tools says they delivered on that promise.
But speaking as a modder I know we always ask for more than devs give us. Modders are like bucket full of wild ideas, we all read what the devs say, think wow my idea is possible and then the game appears and the idea does not work, we assume the devs broke their promise but the reality usually is that they did not even consider that idea or had something else in mind.
For example Frogboy says you could make a Baldurs gate style game out of it, first thought I had was of a real Baldurs gate style game. Then I sat back and remembered the FE campaign and worked out what he meant by that. Yes we could make a Baldurs game STYLE game out of it, but it would be EXACTLY what you might consider to be Balduers gate style. If I made plans based on it being exactly like Baldurs gate, I may be very disappointed. But if I adapt the idea to FE, I think Frogboy would be right and the idea would be possible.
When Frogboy said he fears what modders will do with the system, I laughed my head off because I know exactly what he means. It is a question of expectations and interpretation
Anyway, these things just take time to get going and it will be down to us modders to do it.
Modding attracts a lot of wanna bees, people who need their hands holding, I like to promote modding as a fun creative hobby but 30 years modding stuff has taught me the hand holders will never make anything. Only those that dive right in ever produce anything worth while.
Mark my words, the doers are the people you should be watching.
Speaking for my self, all I ask is that the devs answer the odd techy question from time to time but I do not expect it, I just hope they will.
That would be annoying I agree.
To be honest, I am still playing the game and wont be modding it for a little while longer but when I do I am thinking of going straight in to my Context Editor since I am old school programmable text editor sort of modder. Tools are great but they usually have limitations and bugs. Not sure how far my approach will get but I look forward to trying
I'm more than glad to offer a helping hand if anyone has any questions, but sometimes I see follow-up questions that really give me pause as to who I'm actually helping. They just make me go "why didn't you just try it yourself?". Instead of asking a question and waiting half a day for a response, just plug it in and see what works and what doesn't.
Open up an XML file, change a value or two, start a game and play for hours in the hope you can see what affect that value had on the game, or the item you modified. Yup, truly a great efficient and productive workflow. As a professional software developer of over 25+ years, if I approached development this same way, nothing would ever get done.
Now I completely understand you don't want to answer obvious questions, but what is obvious to one person is not so obvious to another, and not everybody has the patience or free time to experiment for hours and hours in an attempt to change what should be a minor thing.
There are a whole lot of different tags in the different XML files; some of them named appropriately as to determine their usage, and others not so much.
So I reiterate, Stardock bragged about how easily it was to mod, they encouraged not only long time modders, but beginners and wannabes, they bragged about being able to make our own scenarios, then... nothing.
Out of curiosity what game was more accessibly modable in your mind?
My point wasn't that I dislike answering obvious questions. My point was that I dislike answering questions that were easier to test than to ask about. Clearly in the situation you imagined that wasn't the case.
Warcraft 3, StarCraft 2, Dragon Age: Origins, Never Winter Nights 2 All of which included editors published or released by the same company that released the game, with either lots of documentation or at least lots of examples.
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